Engineering Manager, Wave
Reliability
$141.9-166.9k
+ Equity.
More information about location
Financial services for underbanked communities
Job no longer available
Financial services for underbanked communities
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$141.9-166.9k
+ Equity.
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make Africa the first cashless continent.
Role
Who you are
- Care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Working at Wave positively impacts millions of lives through fast and cheap mobile money services. By helping us stay reliable and scalable, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of lots of underserved people
- Want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting-edge shiny tech. This helps us keep Wave simple to operate and makes it easier to achieve our reliability goals
- Want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate. Our mission-focused culture makes sure that everyone you’ll work with is here primarily for the same reason—to make our users’ lives better. That alignment makes it easy to work with anyone across the company, even if there’s some tension between your short-term goals. This is especially helpful for teams like infrastructure that collaborate closely with many other product teams
- At least two years of experience as a manager supporting infrastructure teams
- Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs)
- Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) and Data Center infrastructure
- Experience, or an interest in networks, particularly telephony
- People management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development
- Relevant project management experience: specifically prioritization, tracking schedules and deadlines, and communicating across team/org boundaries
- Experience managing process design: running a smooth on-call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc
- Hiring experience: You can predict staffing needs, design interview loops, evaluate candidates, and assist with closing candidates at the offer stage
- Experience with cloud and data centre architecture, cost management, software development, and orchestration of containerised workloads
What the job involves
- You’ll lead the infrastructure teams, which ensures that Wave’s backend stays as close to “always up” as possible and can scale as our user base grows. Infrastructure is extremely important to Wave for two reasons:
- We’re one of the fastest-growing financial services providers ever, which causes a steady stream of new scalability challenges
- We’ve become critical infrastructure for many of our users—if we go down, they can’t access their money
- Because of this, keeping a reliable and secure infrastructure are two of our top engineering priorities
- Prioritize the teams’ work in collaboration with senior engineers, the Director of Platform, and local partners
- Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues
- Design processes (e.g. incident response, postmortem review) that allow the team to operate smoothly
- Collaborate with other product and platform teams to implement reliability improvements across Wave
- Attract and hire exceptional engineers to the team
- Building tooling to observe and debug outages and performance problems
- Hardening Wave’s backend to be more resilient to incidents
- Enabling product teams to discover and fix reliability/performance issues in code they own
- Responding to incidents, analyzing postmortems, and prioritizing the resulting action items
- Building the hybrid cloud and data center infrastructure to run our application and telephony services
Our take
Because of things like high fees and a lack of local branches, about half of the adults in Africa still do not have a bank account. Although this is an improvement on past estimates, the continent is still significantly underbanked - which is what Wave helps to combat.
Wave addresses this banking gap with technology, offering a straightforward and cost-effective tool accessible via mobile. The impact has been substantial. A 2021 GSMA report suggested over 500 million mobile money accounts were registered in Africa, facilitating transactions valued at nearly $500 billion.
Wave has already established its presence in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Mali, using steady investment to expand its footprint and reach unicorn status. It also continues to enhance product development and engineering efforts, as well as shore up business operations. Despite challenger companies emerging, Wave has a considerable head start on the competition.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Mar 2022
$10m
LATE VC
Sep 2021
$200m
SERIES A
Total funding: $210.2m
Company benefits
- Subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents (vary from country to country)
- 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Retirement contributions (vary from country to country)
- Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries
Company HQ
Mermoz Sacre-coeur, Dakar, Dakar Region
Leadership
Drew Durbin
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously co-founder and CEO at Sendwave (International Remittance).
Lincoln Quirk
(Co-Founder)Previously co-founder and CTO at Newsbrane, Engineer at Demiurge Studios and co-founder of Sendwave (International Remittance).
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